The family looked at each other in dejected amazement.
They had never known it.

“He is going,” said Agamemnon; and indeed
it seemed as though he was gone; but he rallied.

“Agamemnon! Valentine! Honore! patriots!
protect the race! Beware of the”—­that
sentence escaped him. He seemed to fancy himself
haranguing a crowd; made another struggle for intelligence,
tried once, twice, to speak, and the third time succeeded:

“Louis’—­Louisian’—­a—­for—­ever!”
and lay still.

They put those two words on his tomb.

CHAPTER LIX

WHERE SOME CREOLE MONEY GOES

And yet the family committee that ordered the inscription,
the mason who cut it in the marble—­himself
a sort of half-Grandissime, half-nobody—­and
even the fair women who each eve of All-Saints came,
attended by flower-laden slave girls, to lay coronals
upon the old man’s tomb, felt, feebly at first,
and more and more distinctly as years went by, that
Forever was a trifle long for one to confine one’s
patriotic affection to a small fraction of a great
country.

* * * *
*

“And you say your family decline to accept the
assistance of the police in their endeavors to bring
the killer of your uncle to justice?” asked
some Americain or other of ’Polyte Grandissime.

“’Sir, mie fam’lie do not want to
fetch him to justice!—­neither Palmyre!
We are goin’ to fetch the justice to them!
And sir, when we cannot do that, sir, by ourselves,
sir,—­no, sir! no police!”

So Clemence was the only victim of the family wrath;
for the other two were never taken; and it helps our
good feeling for the Grandissimes to know that in
later times, under the gentler influences of a higher
civilization, their old Spanish-colonial ferocity was
gradually absorbed by the growth of better traits.
To-day almost all the savagery that can justly be
charged against Louisiana must—­strange to
say—­be laid at the door of the Americain.
The Creole character has been diluted and sweetened.

One morning early in September, some two weeks after
the death of Agricola, the same brig which something
less than a year before had brought the Frowenfelds
to New Orleans crossed, outward bound, the sharp line
dividing the sometimes tawny waters of Mobile Bay from
the deep blue Gulf, and bent her way toward Europe.